Rupert and Roger and K T and Petraeus

Somehow I missed this. Three weeks ago the Washington Post buried a piece by Bob Woodward in the Style section on Rupert Murdoch’s effort to buy the American presidency. Carl Bernstein wrote about it this week in the Guardian. Bob Woodward and the Post have a spring 2011 tape of Fox contributor KT McFarland (on behalf of Roger Ailes) offering Gen. David Petraeus the full support of Ailes, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News staff if he’ll run for president:

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch’s ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America’s democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

In the American instance, Murdoch’s goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election.

McFarland laid out the terms of the deal in high-quality audio:

“The big boss is bankrolling it. Roger’s going to run it. And the rest of us are going to be your in-house” – thereby confirming what Fox New critics have consistently maintained about the network’s faux-news agenda and its built-in ideological bias.

Carl Bernstein:

“And here let us posit the following: were an emissary of the president of NBC News, or of the editor of the New York Times or the Washington Post ever caught on tape promising what Ailes and Murdoch had apparently suggested and offered here, the hue and cry, especially from Fox News and Republican/Tea Party America, from the Congress to the US Chamber of Commerce to the Heritage Foundation, would be deafening and not be subdued until there was a congressional investigation, and the resignations were in hand of the editor and publisher of the network or newspaper.”